Watch "The Making of LUMINARY"
From anxiety to peace, from Greek mountains to upstate New York, from singing with cicadas to mixing (with minimal tears in between).
Check Out the LUMINARY Ad in Billboard Magazine!
Gifted to Cheryl by her fans. ➡️ ➡️ ➡️
The LUMINARY Story
There aren't many government SCUBA divers-turned-pop-artists-turned-film-composers who battled panic attacks, looked for audio to help quell the anxiety, and composed a stunning album in an abandoned mountain town in Greece as the solution. Cheryl B. Engelhardt is one of those people.
The music is all about finding your own light. Thus the source of the music, while sounding symphonic or electronically generated, is simply a live grand piano, bell, and Cheryl's breath and vocalizations. She plucked piano strings and reversed audio files to create a vast soundscape that is both simple and compelling.
More impressive than the piano performance of a veteran player, or the four-octave vocal jumps mixed so the pristine musicality is felt rather than flaunted, is that LUMINARY was
composed, performed, engineered, produced and mixed by Engelhardt herself. The album was mastered by Frank Gagliardi.
About CHERYL
Cheryl B. Engelhardt is a composer and singer/songwriter with dozens of film and commercial scores, four piano-pop albums, 20 tours, and 40+ TV placements under her belt. Her fifth album, "LUMINARY", landed #1 on iTunes and Amazon in the New Age category.
The New Yorker graduated from Cornell University, studied orchestration at Juilliard, and began her tenure as a composer for films, ads, theater, and social justice choirs.
Her success as an independent musician made Engelhardt a sought-after speaker who has presented multiple actionable and often-hilarious talks at SXSW, ASCAP Expo, and multiple colleges around the country. Committed to helping other independent musicians garner extraordinary results in their careers, Engelhardt provides programs and resources on her site In The Key Of Success.
Recent career highlights include performing on stage with Sting, the premier of several of her social justice-themed choral pieces in Jerusalem, Mexico City, and universities, and the first staged production of her musical "Boiler Room Girls" based on a Kennedy event in the late '60's.
Engelhardt lives in the Hudson Valley of New York with her mountain guide husband and their pooch.